Re: "Dead Doll" Discussion **SPOILERS**
I decided to go through and watch the show again and see what I thought. Warning: I am a GSR shipper, so I did go into details a bit with some of it...
Caution: All this is JUST MY OPINION.
Here's what I wrote:
My most anticipated returning show did not fail me. CSI was an absolute treat. It was visually stimulating. It was emotional. The music was its own character.
I felt like I was watching a brilliant foreign film at times, and I'm just so excited to have been able to see it live, and to have it recorded so I can watch it over and over again to my heart's content.
We start off this season where we left off, and a lot is told in flashbacks, so I'll start with that to take you on Sara's epic journey, in chronological order:
Sara's in the elevator of a garage, headed up. While we're supposed to believe she's coming back from eating at the veggie place downstairs, she's strangely carrying her case and wearing her vest. Her phone rings, and when she answers, the world cheers as they hear: "Hello Gilbert."
Gil fills her in on Natalie Davis, psycho ex-foster child of Ernie Dell who's been killing people, making miniatures, and cleaning at the lab. Yeah.
As Sara opens her trunk and hangs up her phone, a voice gets her attention. She turns around just in time for Natalie the Psycho to taser her. Sara convulses, falling to the ground, writhing in pain.
Now, I've seen people tasered before, and this was a very different reaction to the type of taser I've seen. So, the writhing took me off-guard a bit.
Natalie drags Sara's unconscious body to her car, puts her in the trunk, and uses a plastic tie to put her hands behind her back. Sara wakes up in the trunk, and brilliantly deduces a plan to get her hands free.
She uses her teeth to pull a taser barb out of her shoulder and spits it behind her, where her hands can reach it. After a moment on struggling, she unlocks the tie. She then brilliantly jimmies the trunk and peaks out. Darn. She's moving too fast to get out safely that way. So, she decides to slow things down a bit.
She pulls the speaker apart, and in the singly creepiest shot of CSI ever, sticks her hand up through the speaker to reach the backseat release. As Natalie drives, oblivious to Sara's movements, Sara pops up in the backseat and starts beating the crap out of Natalie. The car swerves and slides as Natalie tries to ward off Sara, who eventually slams the Psycho's head into the passenger side window. Oh, yeah. Don't mess with Sara.
Sara tries to jump out, but hits the ground wrong, too fast, and ends up hurting herself. As she lies there, struggling to maintain consciousness, Natalie hovers over her, looking down at Sara with a mixture of the curiosity of a child and the predatory feel of a wolf.
When next we see Sara, she's lying in the backseat, hands tied in front of her, gashes across her face. Natalie forces her to drink some water, and Sara decides to try a new tactic. As Natalie drives, Sara tries to speak of their kinship, to show that they are alike, and when Ernie comes up, Sara tries to convince Psycho that Ernie wouldn't want this.
"Ernie loved me more than Grissom could ever love you."
It's a statement void of emotion, the product of a deranged mind maddened at the loss of the only person who cared about her, and about whom she cared.
Sara sits there, the new information confusing her, the drugs taking their effect on her mind, but as she begins to slip away from coherent thought, she suddenly understands what this is about. Natalie wants revenge.
Sara awakens, again, this time as a hydraulic device lowers the car on top of her. Natalie watches, smiling, enjoying. Sara struggles to move, to get away, but the weight of the vehicle crushes her, pushing her against the dirt, forcing her to lie still lest she wreak more havoc on her body.
When Natalie drives away, you can see how pissed and desperate Sara is. She wants to get away, and she wants to tear the crap out of Natalie. A coyote mysteriously appears and sniffs at Sara, and the only thing I can say is: Thank the Lord they got rid of the whimpering. In the version released online, the coyote whimpered when the lightning struck. It was, in a word, ridiculous, and I laughed every time I saw it.
When the rain starts to rise, Sara starts to get desperate. She pulls and pulls, trying to get her arm free, but the water's not flowing strong enough to displace the vehicle. She screams in pain, trying not to cry as she gives one great pull, hoping it's enough, realizing she's just doing more damage.
An idea strikes her. She ducks down, trying to swim under the car, which is now almost completely surrounded with water. She can't breathe, but there's a rearview mirror in reach. She reaches for it, desperate to hold it, and as soon as it's in her grasp, she begins breaking up the ground around her.
See, the water was skidding along the desert because it was compact, and not loose. As she loosens the dirt, it gives her more wiggle room, and the music hits perfectly as she emerges from the vehicle. There's a triumphant sound, and just this amazing moment where she looks back at the car, as if looking back to see what she had done, to see what
she had overcome. She clings to her injured arm, but she pushes forward, searching for higher ground, trying to get away, trying to find some kind of civilization and help.
Sara wanders, her shirt torn apart to form a sling for her left arm, and a cover for her head. She's walking wounded, but pushing forward. She keeps the rearview mirror in her hand. Some argue this was so she could signal help, but I personally feel it was more about having a token of what she had been through, a piece of what had happened. Ok,
it could be both. I concede.
She keeps wandering, and when she finds a dead body, points the way so that the person can be recovered. She can't help it. She doesn't want the dead to be left there, to not be discovered, to have a family not know where their child is. She can't help it. She has to do it.
She finds a map on the ground, and as she presses on, she's hurting, but it seems to be ok. She's got a direction and a goal, and that's keeping her moving. However, when she tops the rocks and sees nothing but desert in every direction, she loses her confidence. She thought she was heading towards help and civilization, but she's more lost than ever, and she's lost that small sense of security she had when she thought she had a direction.
She stands up there, and you can feel the air in her balloon deflate. She hasn't had any water. She's wandering around in the heat of the day, and she thought it was all for something. Now, it seems like a waste.
She does times tables in her head, and talks to herself, fighting through the pain and the delirium. She's trying to stay active and awake, but it eventually overtakes her, and she collapses into the sand a football field away from the road.
On the team side: A lot is happening, and fast, and every person is important.
Catherine and Greg stand in the parking garage where Sara went missing, hoping to get an idea, a clue, a shimmering light to point them in the right direction through the dark night. Greg notes cameras, and figured out which one would have the better view, while Catherine questions the security guard on Sara's picture, asking if she looks familiar.
Apparently, she likes to eat at the veggie place downstairs a few times a week.. around 7:30... in her CSI vest...
And, the video feed goes offsite, and apparently no one was watching while a woman was tasered, lied on the ground writhing in pain, then was dragged across a parking lot and probably banged around a bit as the 110 pound girl who kidnapped her tried to get her in the trunk.
Meanwhile, Gil and Brass are chatting about how they have three helicopters in the air with night vision capabilities, and that the cooling temperatures should make finding a body in the desert that's warm easy. However, Gil counters that if she's under the car, the metal will shield her body, hiding it from the sensors.
I know a lot of people have complained that this episode didn't have science, but I didn't know that metal could hide body heat, so that was quite intriguing for me.
Gil decides to run a little experiment with water on the mini, and finds that the Sara mini's covered in it by the time he's done. Note: Yes, the doll's arm stops. Yes, that's because water shorted the circuit, but the point is that Sara's lying there, trapped under a car, COVERED in water.
Nick and Warrick are at the apartment, searching for some clue to help them figure out what happened to Sara. They find Psycho's sketchbook, filled with varying levels of detail of the shot of the infamous touch.
Warrick takes off to work on the car when he hears they found it, and he scours the thing, searching for something that'll help.
Meanwhile, Nick finds Natalie's computer, and realizes she's been scouring the desert for locations on a mapquest style site. That, at least, gives them some sort of place to start, some piece of information to get them going.
Warrick uses a special, nifty device to figure out how much distance the last trip was, and comes up with 34 miles one way. That's a nifty device for women who don't trust their husbands to have. If you want to know if they're lying about going to the bar, just make sure you know how far it is from work to home, or to the bar, and do the math.
Anyway, Gil relays that information to Nick, telling him to tell Brass to focus on spots within 34 miles.
Though, I think that measurement will be a LITTLE off after all the flailing around that car did under duress during Sara and Psycho's car fight.
Gil hangs up, and his mind drifts to Sara, to his love, and we flashback to one of my favourite moments of the show, from "Scuba Doobie Do." Grissom was stressed. He was pissed. His pulse was racing and he was desperate for answers. He is, again, now. But in that moment, she was there to stroke his face, and showed she cared.
He shakes himself out of the memory. She's not here, now. That's the point. Sara can't comfort him because if he doesn't hurry, she could be dead.
Honestly, the first time I saw that moment, of him remembering that touch, I about had a heart attack. It was just the perfect moment to go back to, the perfect thought for him to have, of her comforting him, trying to give him strength and love. He needs that so desperately, right now, and he needs her, but he can't get to her. So, his mind is flashing back to her, and that moment was just such an amazing one when it first aired, and to see that moment in his mind just validated SDD's importance in the GSR timeline. It was important, and it stayed with him as it did with us.
Since the CSI's are all out of the lab, it's up to Hodges to go swab the Psycho for DNA and look under her fingernails. I'm assuming this is so they can match the DNA on the driver's side window with her scalp to verify that the attack took place after the kidnapping, therefore you can't assert in court that she snapped and decided to put Sara under a car as a result of head trauma.
As many of us suspected at the end of Season 7, Psycho has officially snapped. She keeps muttering, "You are special," going back to her conversation with Ernie, in which she wanted to make sure she was his "Special girl." In her father's eyes, she wasn't the prized child, but for Ernie, she was something special. Psycho treasured that.
Catherine discovers a taser barb lodged in the tired, which is consistent since we only saw one strike Sara, and it was from a considerable distance away.
Greg finally has the video, and he and Gil watch the video, annoyed, confused. The car heads West, according to security videos, helping narrow down the field for searching for Sara. Again, a little information from a little detective work helped them get another clue.
As the weather worsens, Hodges tries to use the soil samples from the car to narrow down where in the desert Sara could be. He has a general area, but it's not specific enough for his liking. It's just too easy to find these soil markers in the desert. There's nothing to specify one specific area to search. However, his findings help narrow down the search radius a little more.
Warrick, in the meantime, scours the car. He finds the plastic tie and the torn apart speaker, and surmises that Sara got out. He says they may be off-base, but I think they'd still need to be searching the desert regardless.
I mean, say Sara did get away. She was still a ways out from the city, and she'd be a warm body on the helicopter's sensors. So, calling off the search would be stupid. It doesn't matter if she escaped, at this point. She could still be in the desert, so searching the desert is good, and continuing to follow the evidence even better.
Nick walks through Natalie's horror house, and he's getting frustrated. He knows what it's like to be the one crying out for rescue, to be the one slowly losing it, to be the one falling apart. He wants to be strong and to keep moving. He wants to keep pushing and to find something that'll help Sara. He's doing his job, and he did find the online site, but somehow it's not enough.
As others have said, Sara found the final piece that led to saving him. He has to find a way to save her.
His mind flashes back to "Gum Drops" and another scene where Sara was just so incredibly strong. Nick wanted to find this girl, and was convinced that he was alive, but Sara was trying to ground him, just in case. It was hard for her, because she would like to believe the girl was alive as well, but it's sometimes easier to believe they're dead to minimize the heartache.
Nick reminds her that he was rescued, and Sara smiles, telling him it wasn't his day to die.
Nick comes out of the flashback, convinced that it's not Sara's either. He smiles, tearing up at the memory of his friend. He glances over the sketches, again, and finds a number written down for a towing company.
Now, some have argued that Natalie did not write it down, but we don't know that she's the one who wrote it. Have you ever asked someone for directions? Sometimes, they'll write it down for you. Natalie could have drawn the Sara drawing later, after the person had written down the information for her. She asked about a towing company, they asked if she had a pen or paper, and she let them write on a page of her sketchbook, but I bet she's the kind who doesn't like a piece of paper to go to waste, so she probably drew on it, anyway.
Moving on, Nick notices it and checks his records on the car. Now, others have said he should have noticed it earlier, but sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees. I mean, he was looking for something small and minute. They all were. But, here was something that was right in front of their faces the whole time, and they just missed it.
I think that's part of why Brass drives into the lot the way he does. It's this annoyance that the answer's been there all along, and you've wasted time, and now it's morning, and it's getting hotter, and you have to save this woman who's a part of your team, your family.
I love Brass. I just have to stop a moment and say that.
"You're either tell me where you took it or you're going to end up in the hospital and after that you're going to end up in jail."
Ice Box Canyon. Brass gets so pissed when he realizes this joker has known all along where the Mustang was.
Greg's up in the whirlybird keeping an eye out, and he spots the thing. But when they get there, no Sara.
And, we get our cheesiest shot of the night as Nick finds Sara's vest, holds it tenderly in his hands, and wipes the dirt off her name.
My husband: "Oh yes, because they're going to find so many other CSI vests under cars in the desert."
I love him.
Anyway, there's no sign of her, but there are mysterious footprints that somehow survived the torrential downpour. I know I'm not supposed to question it, and I'm supposed to believe it, but with that kind of downpour, and the amount of sand buildup around the Mustang compared to when we last saw Sara underneath it, those footprints should not have survived the night.
Anyway, they start following the magical footprints, and Gil's just struggling. He and Catherine march out together into the desert, following the footprints. Eventually, they find Sara's little stones, assuming they lead to her. When they find the long-haired dead guy, it's a little hilarious, because they're wiping his face so sweetly, and it's not her. I know I shouldn't laugh, but it's just a tad amusing. Sorry.
When we come back from commercial, Gil's starting to feel the loss of hope Sara felt when she stood atop that rock. When you have a goal and a mission, and something you're following, you feel this inner motivation to survive, and this drive to complete the journey. However, when something throws a wrench in your plan, and all you see is desert around you, it's disheartening.
"Where is she, Catherine?" he asks.
His brain goes into overdrive, calculating how her body must be reacting to this weather. She's disoriented and delirious from the lack of water and the pounding sun. Her body is dehydrated, and she's pressing onward, he hopes. Or, she's dead.
Catherine shoots back that Sara's a survivor, and while Grissom doesn't seem completely reassured, it's an offer of support, and he appreciates it. It refocuses him, and he stops going on and on about the conditions and refocuses on the mission.
Sophia and Nick find a back road that hardly anyone ever takes, but it's in the direction they believe Sara is heading. When Nick sees the reflection of the mirror, it's like seeing the little girl in "Gum Dropsâ laying on the shore with gum in her hand. Nick rushes to her side, pouring water all over her to drop her temperature while Sophia calls it in. There's no radial pulse, but she's alive, barely holding on.
The medics work, and when Catherine and Grissom arrive only to hear that Sara's not responding, it's almost more than he can bear. He covers his face, struggling to keep it together, then adjusts his hat, looking down on her.
When they load her into the helicopter, my heart sank, not because I was convinced she was going to die, but because I thought they were going to make Grissom stay behind. He wasn't about to have that, though.
"Move over. I'm going with her!"he yells.
He moves the medics over and climbs in, watching Sara, willing her to wake up. He slips his hand into hers, staying out of the way of the medics, but trying to make sure that if she's at all aware of her surroundings, she knows someone's there.
It's a beautiful and poetic move on his part, because Sara's so often needed a hand. When she was a little girl, and her mother killed her father, she said she couldn't let go of the woman's hand who took her into foster care. She couldn't let go. She needed that hand.
When Sara sat in the hospital with the little girl whose father "The Buffalo" abused her and whose sister was also her mother, Sara took the little girl's hand.
When Sara almost got a DUI, Gil was there to take her hand.
When she told him what happened to her parents, he reached out to take her hand.
When she found a dying girl under a bed, she held her hand. Then, she held the hand of the person who murdered her, unknowingly offering comfort to a killer.
Now, Sara needs someone to hold her hand, and Gil does.
The camera focuses on the ice packs, and on the dripping IV, which, to me, signals that they are doing their job. Sara's eyes open, and though she can't really focus, she sees the name "Grissom." As her eyes focus, she locks hers on Gil, and squeezes his hand and doesn't let go.
Gil smiles down on her with a look of love so intense, I melted into a pile of goo. He's looking at her as though he were completely naked, stripped of his pretenses and fears. In this moment, he is Gil Grissom, the man who's in love with Sara Sidle. He's no one else. He's not her boss. He's not her former mentor. He's not an entomologist. He's not a CSI. He is a man. He's a man in love with her.
After a moment, he remembers his surroundings, acknowledging the other people by glancing their direction, but then he focuses back on Sara, and falls even deeper into her eyes as he offers a gentle smile.
This to me is almost even more important than the initial look of love. Because, now he's acknowledged and remembered where he was, and that there were other people around, and he just doesn't care. He's going to love her openly, and nothing else matters.
What a way to open the season.
